Haliburton Park

As Josh Marshall writes, it is truly impressive the amount of time, effort, and yes, money the administration puts in to screw the poor and displaced.

As President Bush tackles the monumental task of easing the social problems wrought by Katrina, he is proving deeply reluctant to use some of the big-government tools at his disposal, apparently out of fear of permanently enlarging programs that he opposes or has sought to cut.

Instead of depending on long-running programs for such services as housing and healthcare, the president has generally tried to create new, one-shot efforts that the administration apparently hopes will more easily disappear after the crisis passes. That has meant relying on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has run virtually all of the recovery effort.

"FEMA can help fill some immediate needs after a disaster, like giving grants to help people repair their roofs or pay for temporary housing," said John P. Sucich, a former senior FEMA official who oversaw the recovery from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. "But it is not the agency to turn to to ensure the kinds of continuing help that families need to begin putting their lives back together.

"That's what the rest of government is for," Sucich said.

At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president's unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

"The idea that -- in a community where we could place people in the private housing market to reintegrate them into society -- we would put them in [trailer] ghettos with no jobs, no community, no future, strikes me as extraordinarily bad public policy, and violates every conservative principle that I'm aware of," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.

"If they do it," Gingrich said of administration officials, "they will look back on it six months from now as the greatest disaster of this administration."

And that, we know, is saying quite a bit.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. The piece goes on to quote HUD Director Keller saying that they had the resources to house the homeless of Katrina: FEMA trailors, of which they have 100,000 on order. Now, admittedly, I have absolutely no knowledge of the trailor construction industry, but even beyond the utter stupidity and unnecessary cruelty of sticking these people in trailors on remote military bases, won't it take months to build so many units?